Broad Art Foundation

Mission: The Broad Art Foundation is the educational and lending resource for an extensive collection of contemporary art. The Broad family formed the foundation after several decades of personal collecting and dedicated patronage and leadership of some of the nation's most prominent museums. The foundation focuses its collecting activities on art from the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Purpose of Site: The Broad Art Foundation's Web site is an integral component in the organization's programming and extends the foundation's mandate to encourage the public appreciation of contemporary art to a worldwide audience of Internet users. The site showcases information about artists, selected images from the collection, and online art resources.

Background: Eli Broad, the chairman of SunAmerica, Inc., and his wife Edythe began collecting contemporary art in the early 1960s. In 1984, the Broad family created a private operating foundation to serve as a lending library that would lend works from its collection without charging fees. The foundation has amassed more than 700 artworks by some 100 artists and continues to acquire actively. Artworks from the foundation's collection have appeared in exhibitions at nearly 400 museums, universities, and other public venues, and have been viewed by approximately one million people per year. Also, about 5,000 art professionals, collectors, members of museum-affiliated groups, and students use the foundation's offices, study center, and private exhibition space each year.

Mr. Broad has been an important patron and board member of more than twenty-five major museums and art institutions nationwide, including the , , and in New York; the and the in Los Angeles; and the Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Home Page: After a flash movie that highlights specific artists and their work, the home page of the Web site features an attractive display of several works in the collection, as well as details about the most recent museum to exhibit a major showing of the Broad collection. Currently, the site highlights an exhibit called "Jasper Johns to Jeff Koons: Four Decades of Art from the Broad Collections."

A set of links is arranged in a horizontal line that stretches across the screen to lead users to the main areas of the site: Purpose, The Broads, The Collection, Recent Acquisition, Exhibitions, Resources, and Contact. Also, the site's introductory flash movie can be replayed by clicking on a link on the home page.

Outstanding Feature:The Collection part of the Broad Art Foundation's site is a virtual museum that features thirty-five works of art from the Broad collection. In addition to an image of the work that can be enlarged in a pop-up window, each page in the virtual museum includes biographical information about the artist, a general discussion of his or her art, and a brief review of the specific piece of art being featured. The site includes work from Jean-Michel Basquiat, Barbara Kruger, and Cindy Sherman. The Recent Acquisition part of the site functions in the same way and currently features Andreas Gursky's 99 Cent, the Broad Art Foundation's most recently-acquired work of art.